Thursday, February 2, 2012

How To Write A New York Times Best Selling Crime Novel

Try to be as pretty, hollow, manufactured and safe as possible

1. Write about America. If you want your book to be a hit then it's going to have to be set in America or about Americans in trouble overseas. American readers largely don't care about the rest of the world and don't buy books set in places they can't easily understand. Publishers know this and encourage it and won't publish your book unless your locale conforms with an easy to grasp set of stereotypes. The exceptions prove the rule. Nordic crime fiction is hot right now because the image of Scandinavia is easy to grasp: snow, Ikea, Volvos, attractive people speaking with a cute accent. English period mysteries are also always in vogue because again we've got attractive white people in lovely costumes. Very occasionally a mystery from say Africa (The Ladies Detective Agency) will break through but crucially those books are written by a nice safe Scottish man. 2. Write about the rich. American society is aspirational. The rich are envied, but the poor are hated. No one wants to read a depressing mystery novel about people in trailer parks struggling to get by or worse about black people in some housing project in the South Bronx.3. Move to Brooklyn Heights. Your debut novel has no chance of getting reviewed in the NYT unless you live in Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights.4. If you are man grow a hipster goatee. If you are a woman try to be very pretty. Why? See rule #3 above. 5. Write about a lawyer. There are two big misconceptions that propel books about lawyers to the top of the best seller lists: 1) lawyers are more intelligent than the average citizen and 2) lawyers mostly work in criminal law. Neither of these is true but editors and readers think they are. 6. Your lead character should be a rebel, but a completely safe rebel who doesn't question the status quo. 7. Don't try to be funny. Funny is very difficult and hard to pull off. Better to play it straight and occasionally slip in the odd gag here and there. Saying that though irony plays well. Post irony plays even better. Ironing however is passe. 8. Have a twist a third of the way into the book and again four pages from the end. Doesn't matter what the twist is or how ridiculous it is, this is what the punters want so this is what you must give them. Everyone will mention the twist in the review. 9. Don't criticise the status quo. I'm serious about this one. If you start bad mouthing The New York Times or big American corporations or doubting the stereotypes that everyone believes in you are in big trouble and your book won't find a publisher. 10. Make it very clear in your letter to potential agents/publishers that this is only book 1 of at least a 12 part series. Publishers will not invest a dime in you unless they see the words FRANCHISE or SERIES emblazoned on your forehead. In other words DO NOT kill your character at the end of the book. Good Luck!

68 comments:

Now that you've got the formula, will your next book be a "A New York Times Best Selling Crime Novel"?

By the way, I'm an exception to Rule 1, since I'm an American who DOES care about the rest of the world and who buys books set in places I don't get at all (listening to Tea Obreht's "The Tiger's Wife" and I've no idea about the area in which it's set).

Or you could be British and write about a crime that happened after the marriage in a classic novel of a couple hundred years ago.

Or you could BE American and pretend to be British and write crime novels about the British upper classes ala Elizabeth George, Martha Grimes or Deborah Crombie.

Or you could defect to television and write a non-Brooklyn series like The Wire.

Or you could just be Janet Evanovich, and write a funny crime series set in working class New Jersey that works very well for the first ten books or so.I don't think anyone ever told her, Enough with the jokes, although maybe they should have at some points.

Yeah, I suppose that last might be even more the case with the greats. Although I suppose it's always true that you get some kind of initial response to the joking around and it kind of grows from there.

I was reading a book about Charles Willeford and it says if he could write a best-seller about the Miami upper crust or a book about a fry cook which would be guaranteed to fail, he would sit down in front of his typewriter and start writing about eggs.

I recently got in a bit of an argument with a buddy who is moving to New York to try and make it as a crime author. I think he wasn't sure what to say when I said I didn't think Nicholas Pileggi and Richard Price made their bones watching people at TGI Friday's.

I also told him he could move to Detroit and rent a 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom house for what he'd pay for a bachelor pad in Brooklyn, but it might be more than he bargained for. That was pretty much where the conversation ended.

On one last note on Willeford - after he wrote his most successful novel to date in the 70s, Cockfighter, he couldn't sell another book for 10 years.

You'd definitely got more life experience in Detroit but would you run into Chad Harbach or Jonathan Safran Froer at a party? Would you meet a girl who writes a column for New York magazine or who is best friends with Gwyneth Paltrow?

Its not really about the books at all is it? Its about being young and connected.

Seana, I think it's interesting the way Elmore Leonard has moved backwards in time and linked together so many of his characters from his westerns ro his modern day novels. Makes a nice timeline for a particular part of Americana.

I also think it's funny how all through his career editors keep asking him to move his books away from Detroit (though I doubt Somalia or Oklahoma is what they had in mind) and he sometimes makes references to that in his books. One of the women in Mr. Paradise is a model and people keep asking her why she lives on Detroit onstead of New York and she says she loves to drive and hates traffic.

Anyway, novels are art right, and art is all about going against the flow, isn't it? Breaking rules? (most of what I say these days is to justify my own very, very poor sales). I think Matt is right, if I was a young guy and wanting to be a writer I'd look at places like Detroit and Rochester and anywhere that has some history but is out of fashion. One thing those Brooklyn hipster editors like to do is think they've discovered something new....

John, you know that your sales are what they are because it's Canada and not America. Your cultural is largely incomprehensible to us. And don't get me started on the language.

One of my friends just died last month. I was at a touching bash for him on Saturday.He was about Leonard's age. He too remained intellectually curious and cantankerous right up to the end. I'm not sure they make 'em like these two anymore.

I just now sent for a copy of John McFetridge's EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE. I've been meaning to do this for some time, but there are so many others jockeying for position on my to-be-read shelf.

The reason I had not read Irish Noir until "discovering it" (on-line at the Rap Sheet a couple of years ago), was that it really hadn't come to my attention before.

Not reviewed enough, or not carried enough by my local booksellers--or not hyped enough, you might say.

Same with Canadian crime authors to some extent. But what interests me most as a reader is GOOD WRITING about the human condition.

Life.Candle burning.Wind coming.

That's the human condition. We know, if we think about it, that all candles eventually burn out, though the flame is passed. We live in constant denial of that fact, while in fear, often hysterically, the potential storms that may snuff out our lives prematurely. We identify with that tenson when we see it, if only subconsciously.

On the surface, the novel may concern topical politics, poverty and class issues, love, sex, crime, or whatever, but underneath it better be aware of the greater human condition.

Lawyers write some good books--lawyer Stephen Greenleaf wrote an excellent blue-collar detective series before he called it quits--but so do philosophy, literature, and history majors.

Clancy Martin, author of my best-book-of-the-year 2009, HOW TO SELL, was a philosophy major.

I'm reading an ARC of ex-lawyer John Burdett's VULTURE PEAK right now and, still in the crucial first fifty pages, the writing carries the day and the foreshadowing makes me think that this, the fourth in the series, will indeed be a gem. I'll be reviewing it in a day or two.

Yeah I love that too. I tried to do the same by having a character from my kids book The Lighthouse Keepers appear in Falling Glass which therefore linked 7 of my books together, but, alas nobody noticed. Or cared.

Yes. Didn't Nietzsche say that the whole edifice of Western Culture was all an attempt to make us not think about death for a little while. Camille Paglia thinks that the entire edifice of Western Culture is more about sexual display. I'd say that sex and death about covers most of it. Grief too as an aspect of death or loss.

I suppose that's why it's such a skill if you can make someone laugh. For those two or three seconds of laughter you're in another place.

Well, I don't put much stock in NYT bestseller lists as they are not always indicative of quality reads. Unfortunately it sees to be a significant component to a writer's career. I read all over the place and so care about what's going on in the rest of the world, prefer my crime fiction set outside the U.S. But Irish crime fiction will be picking up soon if it hasn't already as I think that's the next area to be super hot after the Scandi-lit wave.

Funny, reading this post I realized that though I read a lot of crime fiction, I'm not a crime fiction reader.

I'm really addicted to a sense of place when I'm reading for pure pleasure. Character growth is a close second, but I really like the feel of being introduced to a specific environment's inner nature.

What I love about well written crime fiction is the way the protagonist's intimate relationship with his or her city shapes who they are and how they act upon their world.

You can say this should be true of any setting, but the life and death centered conflict allows for a more explicit exploration of a city's and a protagonist's soul.

I recently read/reread a mountain of Chandler and that's really what I came away with-- The heat-and-mist-and-easy-chisels-LA and how every time Marlowe was looking at a big pay day he hands the money back to keep his integrity in the face of it.

We caught Anne Patchet on the Colbert Show last night, and she was touting her bookstore in Nashville, saying that the chains had closed and that big city was without a decent bookstore until Parnassus Bookstore opened.

We found that hard to believe, but we enjoyed her sense of humor. I may have to order her new book too--or maybe my wife will.

As tough as things are for authors and booksellers, good books still abound. I'm grateful for the day.

So what about if you kill your main character off at the end of book 1, get his brother or someone to takeover & then do a further 11 books as a ghost story? Could start a new trend as a genre change every few books to get new readers? No? Nor me lolRegarding the Swedish & dead comment from Peter, it brought me to an oft thought point of mine, that with the amount of publishers & agents that specify they wont touch rape, I wonder if they realise that they'd have missed out on the supposed literary phenomenon of our times. Not, I hasten to add, that I'm trivialising rape

1. Hard drinking, bachelor PI2. Take job from uber rich man or woman3. Get involved with beautiful relative of client4. Muck through the depraved moral shenanigans of the rich 5. Dump rich relative after she proves to be worst of the lot6. Solve crime, take a hot shower.

Richard, no, I believe Ann Patchett about why she opened the bookstore. Working in a long struggling independent as I do, which, quite miraculously survived the onslaught of both Crown and Borders, I couldn't tell you how many out of towners come to our store from various parts and tell us that with the demise of Borders, they have no bookstore anywhere near.

Is NYC really the cultural mecca it thinks it is? How many people can even afford half of its attractions?

I used to read the trivial sections of the Sunday NYT - Travel, Arts& "Leisure" - until I finally had to concede that I just wasn't the target audience. And the NYT book critics seem to go for novels where the characters are affluent professionals with advanced degrees.

I tried to read a John Banville crime novella and I was unimpressed. Maybe I'm a cultural Visigoth but when I found out it had been serialized in The New Yorker I thought, "No wonder it kind of sucked."

I'm drawn to novels where the people remind me of me: the depressed Jar City detective living on frozen dinners; the guilt-ridden Fegan of The Ghosts of Belfast. I'm probably a narcissist but I need stories that are somehow instructive and affirming.

And Daniel Woodrell can be so damn funny.

P.S. I'm with shullamith re: sense of place, which is something the NI crime writers are especially great at.

Since I can't travel the world, and undo the years I was raising kids, and going to school, and working, I am catching up on history and going places I can only dream about. I love books written about LA that aren't about Hollywood, and I have an addiction to Scandinavian and Irish fiction. Right now, I'm in Greece, which is surreal given what is going on there. Books teach me and transform me, and I try to buy as much as I can. I'm a little um-skeptical. I remember Brooklyn when it wasn't so attractive. I t became like that as a reaction to Manhattan prices. bottom line, I rarely read NYTimes best sellers. Franzen bores me, Foer-I don't know. Sometimes, these books feel very self indulgent to me. I'm old enough to ead what I want, not what I should :)

The NYT bestseller lists are certainly not an indication of quality but they usually are an indication of a writer's ability to support herself purely through writing. If you wanna quit the day job its good to make the list.

The travel section of the NYT is excuse my French such a fucking joke. Talk about being aspirational. Clearly they feel they are in competition with Conde Nast Traveller to appeal the richest people in the East Coast. You have to be seriously well heeled to go to any of the places they recommend. When they came to Melbourne they recommended you stay at the most expensive hotel in the city and dine at its most exclusive (and worst) restaurants.

For Swooperman's story, he could see his own ghost. Or maybe he can't see himself at all anymore, because he's not the man he was.

I liked Franzen's piece in the New Yorker about Edith Wharton very much. It's funny, because he was writing about how difficult we may find to empathize with her due to her place of privilege. Frankly, though, I've never found it hard to empathize with her or admire her.

Its always amazing when they have any kind of an author on a chatshow instead of a Kardassian or whoever.

Craig Ferguson's show is about as silly as the others, but the guy must like crime fiction. He's had Ken Bruen, Stuart Neville, Lawrence Block and Laur Lippman as guests. Neville even got a nice, long time to talk about his work, quite possibly because Ferguson had just bought a movie option for The Ghosts of Belfast.

Interesting tidbit, yeah, but we wish he'd get back to work on his novel that is completed (some of us have read it) yet not released to his editors. Beats me. He may be holding it back for his son to release at his death. Meanwhile, he has that screenplay that Scott Ridley is directing.

On the backstory of SUNSET LIMITED he talks with Jones and Jackson a bit, and one of the things he says is that he wrote his Beckett-like play when he was in Ireland, rambling around an old house by himself, getting plenty of work done.

Elsewhere I've heard that McCarthy went there to do historical and genealogical research and I'm wondering what else he was working on.

McCarthy seems lately to have been reading David Eagleman's excellent INCOGNITO: THE SECRET LIVES OF THE BRAIN, as he and Gell-Man and Sam Shepherd are all quoted on the great role the subconscious plays in science as well as writing.

On the subject of this thread, McCarthy has said that he believes that the choice should not be between quality or commercialism, but that good riding bridges the gap, is all inclusive, that one story should be all stories.

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More about me

I was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University I emigrated to New York City where I lived in Harlem for seven years working in bars, bookstores, building sites and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in Washington Heights.

In 2000 I moved to Denver, Colorado where I taught high school English and started writing fiction in earnest. My first full length novel Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was picked by Booklist as one of the 10 best crime novels of the year.

In mid 2008 I moved to St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia with my wife and kids. My last book In The Morning I'll Be Gone won the 2014 Ned Kelly Award.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

All Hail McKinty!

"If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland he would have written The Cold Cold Ground."

---The Times

"Hardboiled charm, evocative dialogue, an acute sense of place and a sardonic sense of humour make McKinty one to watch."

---The Guardian

"A literary thriller that is as concerned with exploring the poisonously claustrophobic demi-monde of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the self-sabotaging contradictions of its place and time, as it is with providing the genre’s conventional thrills and spills. The result is a masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great Troubles novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written The Cold Cold Ground."

---The Irish Times

"McKinty is a big new talent."

---The Daily Telegraph

"McKinty is a gifted man with poetry coursing through his veins and thrilling writing dripping from his fingertips."

---The Sunday Independent

"Adrian McKinty is fast gaining a reputation as the finest of the new generation of Irish crime writers, and it's easy to see why on the evidence of The Cold Cold Ground."

---The Glasgow Herald

"McKinty is a storyteller with the kind of style and panache that blur the line between genre and mainstream."

---Kirkus Reviews

"McKinty's literate expertly crafted crime novel confirms his place as one of his generation's leading talents."

---Publishers Weekly

"McKinty crackles with raw talent. His dialogue is superb, his characters rich and his plotting tight and seemless. He writes with a wonderful and wonderfully humorous flair for language raising his work above most crime genre offerings and bumping it right up against literature."

---The San Francisco Chronicle

"McKinty keeps getting better. He melds the snap and crackle of the old Mickey Spillane tales with the literary skills of Raymond Chandler and sets it all down in his own artful way."

---The Rocky Mountain News

"The first of McKinty's Forsythe novels, "Dead I Well May Be," was intense, focused and entirely brilliant. This one is looser-limbed, funnier...so, I imagine, is the middle book, "The Dead Yard," which I haven't read but which Publishers Weekly included on its list of the 12 best novels of 2006, along with works by Peter Abrahams, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy and George Pelecanos."

---The Washington Post

"McKinty, who grew up in Northern Ireland, has an ear for language and a taste for violence, and he serves up a terrifically gory, swiftly paced thriller."

---The Miami Herald

"There's nothing like an Irish tough guy. And we're not talking about Gentleman Gerry Cooney here. No, we mean the new breed of bare-knuckle Irish writers like Adrian McKinty, Ken Bruen and John Connolly who are bringing fresh life to the crime fiction genre."

---The Philadelphia Inquirer

"McKinty's writing is dark and witty with gritty realism, spot on dialogue, and fascinating characters."

---The Chicago Sun-Times

"If you like your noir staples such as beautiful women, betrayal, murder, mixed with a heavy dose of blood, crunched bones, body parts flying around served up with some throwaway humour, you need look no further, McKinty delivers all of this with the added bonus that the writing is pitch perfect."

---The Barcelona Review

"I really enjoyed [Dead I Well May Be’s] combination of toughness and a striking literary style. Both those things are evident in Hidden River. McKinty is going places."

---The Observer

"This is a terrific read. McKinty gives us a strong non stop story with attractive characters and fine writing."

---The Morning Star

"[McKinty] draws us close and relates a fantastic tale of murder and revenge in low, wry tones, as if from the next barstool...he drops out of conversational mode to throw in a few breathtaking fever-dream sequences for flavor. And then he springs an ending so right and satisfying it leaves us numb with delight and ready to pop for another round. Start the cliche machine: This is a profoundly satisfying book from a major new talent and one of the best crime fiction debuts of the year."

---Booklist

"The story is soaked in the holy trinity of the noir thriller: betrayal, money and murder, but seen through with a panache and political awareness that give McKinty a keen edge over his rivals."

---The Big Issue

"A darkly humorous cross between a hard-boiled mystery and a Beat novel."

---The St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A roller coaster of highs and lows, light humour and dark deeds, the powerful undercurrent of McKinty's talent will swiftly drag you away. Let's hope the author does not slow down anytime soon."

---The Irish Examiner

"A virtual carnival of slaughter."

---The Wall Street Journal

"McKinty has once again harnassed the power of poetry, violence, lust and revenge to forge a sequel to his acclaimed Dead I Well May Be."

"McKinty writes with the soul of a poet; his prose dances off the pages with Old World grace and haunting intensity. It's crime fiction on the level of Michael Connolly with the conviction of James Hall."

---The Jackson Clarion-Ledger

"The Bloomsday Dead is the explosive final installment in a trilogy of kinetic thrillers."

---The New York Times

"Adrian McKinty has garnered nothing but praise for his first two books. The third in the trilogy The Bloomsday Dead should leave no doubt that he is a true star. Fast moving and highly engaging this is a great book. McKinty just gets better and better."

---CrimeSpree

"Until The Dead Yard's relentless, poignant ending you'll turn these pages as quickly as you can."

---The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"McKinty's Dead Trilogy has been praised by critics, who call it "intense," "masterful" and "loaded with action." If your reading pleasure leans toward thrillers offering suspense, close calls, wry wit, sharp dialogue, local color and sudden mayhem, you wont do better."

What's Next For Me?

A couple more books, a few birthdays, some shuffleboard then a period spent in the digestive tract of earthworms, followed by molecular breakdown, the sun boiling into space, the heat death of the universe, atomic decay, perpetual darkness, a trillion years of nothingness and then, if we're lucky, brane collapse, a new singularity and a new Big Bang.

Me & the Mrs in our survivalist bunker

Adios and thank you for stopping by....

Followers

The measure of a writer isn't success, but how hard he tried to do what he knew he couldn't do---William Faulkner

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen---J G Ballard

I read the dictionary once . . . It turns out that the zebra did it --- Steven Wright

Times are bad. Children disobey their parents and everyone is writing a book---Cicero